


Wake My Spirit Cold

by asleepygay



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Anxiety Disorder, M/M, No Plot/Plotless, a character study of sorts?, like diagnosed disorders u feel, really short thing about bucky having anxiety
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-01
Updated: 2018-02-01
Packaged: 2019-03-12 10:15:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13545261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asleepygay/pseuds/asleepygay
Summary: There were a lot of things that people didn't understand about James Buchanan Barnes.a very short fic about socially anxious Bucky Barnes.





	Wake My Spirit Cold

**Author's Note:**

> someone asked thestuckylibrary for fics with accurate representation of social anxiety or written by someone with social anxiety, so I did that? I can't promise anything about accuracy for anyone else, and honestly I might have laid it on a little thick trying to bring representation in this fic, but yknow. I tried. I'm diagnosed with social and general anxiety disorder so this fic is heavily based on my own experiences with anxiety and hopefully that does something for someone somewhere. and, like...there's no plot here at all. my bad. this deals basically exclusively w the way our boy handles himself and his mental illness.
> 
> title is from spirit cold by tall heights, which just happened to be playing when I finished this and then worked surprisingly well so thanks to the spotify gods.

2:15 PM

The details were already getting kind of fuzzy when they got back to their floor. Something something charity, something something black-tie event, something something guests of honor, something something required attendance. 

“We don’t have to go,” Steve said, sitting down next to him on the couch. They probably absolutely did have to go, otherwise Pepper wouldn’t have told them they did. She was nice and organized and commanding, and Bucky didn’t think she liked him very much. That was fine, it wasn’t like he had given her much reason to. 

He wondered if they were being told on such short notice to deny them the time to find a way out of it. His mouth was starting to go a little dry.

7:50 PM

There were a lot of things that people didn’t understand about James Buchanan Barnes. How he broke out of seventy years of brainwashing, for one thing. How he got pardoned for his crimes. How he could be here at a gala for some nonprofit or another in the year 2018. That last one, especially in conjunction with those other two, was kind of a doozy.

Even the rest of the team had some trouble with it at first. It was okay, he got it. It was hard for people to look at him and reconcile the historic soldier with the Winter Soldier with the man who stood before them. The team mostly got over it, and he appreciated that in ways he didn’t know how to vocalize. His therapist was still encouraging him to try, but. While he had grown to understand and respect her more in the years since he’d first started seeing her, some things just weren’t likely to happen. That was probably what she would call “negative self talk,” which he wasn’t supposed to do, but he would be the first to admit that he wasn’t perfect. Steve made a joke about it once, a self-deprecating thing like he used to do when he thought he had to get down on himself before anyone else got the chance to, and said Bucky should “reframe” it. Call it “practical goal setting” instead, therapists loved that kind of thing. Steve understood a lot of things a lot better than anyone else did.

And really, who else could have known this? Bucky had done the research. Usually, before describing their efforts in the war, the textbooks and biographies included a line or two about how Bucky used to go out all the time, when he wasn’t taking care of Steve. It was kind of ridiculous, because he hadn’t even gone out all that much and because even though he did like to on occasion, it didn’t mean anything like what everyone thought it meant. Only Steve knew the way he sometimes got clammy being around people for too long, the way he loved to dance but hated attention, the way his exuberance in public was more armor than it was letting loose. He used to be able to pretend to be someone else when he went out, put on a mask of enthusiasm so that he could dance the way he liked to until that weak weariness crept in. After solid years of working through the mess the Winter Soldier program had made of his head, his therapist told him with no small amount of surprise that he probably had a couple of what are now called anxiety disorders. And wasn’t that something? Today he could be queer and get uncomfortable in crowds and there were words for those things because people actually talked about them sometimes. Clearly not too much, because nobody ever thought that could be Bucky, but sometimes. Steve though, he always knew.

10:02 PM

That was probably why his hand was solid at Bucky’s back, not gripping but grounding, guiding him purposefully through the crowd on their way out. They’d made it almost a full half hour after the time they were allowed to leave, which was sort of exciting, even though it was before anyone else was likely to leave. That was probably rude, but he couldn’t do it anymore. There was an iron grip of something closing his throat, frustrating and awful in the way that it was layered, an old and unfounded panic melding with a new and very much justified paranoia to cloud his mind. 

People were shouting things at Steve and him on their way out, small recording devices out and cameras around the room flashing. Most of those cameras had to be focused on other guests doing other things, on the waiters with their shiny trays and on the band playing on a dias at the other end of the room, but Bucky could still feel the heat around his chest squeezing harder. He gave his best 40’s Bucky Smile towards the cameras nearby, the one that made Steve flinch and everyone else relax, and walked faster.

“Headed out so early?” Someone yelled good-naturedly, like they were all friends and not like they had to be there so they could sell stories of the evening’s events. Bucky flinched minutely and he and Steve walked faster.

Once they were in the privacy of the car that would take them back to the tower, Steve rubbed Bucky’s cold right hand between his own to encourage circulation. They didn’t do anything else with the driver so near, but the small contact helped. Bucky took deep breaths the way he was supposed to, pictured their apartment with its secluded spaces and comfortable bed, and relaxed a little against Steve’s side. Steve smiled at him encouragingly and Bucky relaxed further. 

10:37

Steve slowly pulled their suits off of them so they could switch into oversized sweats, stopping frequently for small kisses.

“You okay?” He murmured against the corner of Bucky’s mouth, pulling him backwards to the living room by them hem of Bucky’s hoodie.

“Yeah, ‘s just annoying.” Bucky croaked back. He didn’t know how else to describe it. It was _annoying_ , the way he couldn’t be in public for too long, the way all of his fears, the rational and the irrational, compounded to create a mental roadblock he couldn’t get around. Even after everything they went through, he felt like he was his own worst enemy more often than not. 

Steve laughed softly and fell back into the couch, Bucky toppling after onto his chest. “Well that’s okay then. You’re plenty used to annoying.”

Bucky cracked a smile for the first time all night. He settled back further into Steve, under his arms and between his legs, tipped his head back against Steve’s shoulder and turned to look into his dumb soft face. “You got that right.” But already, his heart had slowed and the tightness was easing. “JARVIS, privacy mode please.”

“Certainly, sir.”

Steve dragged his fingers through Bucky’s hair with one hand and flipped through Netflix with the other. He was more than used to Bucky’s social exhaustion and paranoia demanding distance from the eyes on them all the time. Until they countered the command, no part of the building’s AI or surveillance systems would be active in their apartment. Finally, for the first time since they were told about that stupid event, Bucky felt truly relaxed. He pressed one more kiss against Steve’s mouth, and was asleep before the movie loaded.


End file.
